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Magnonic Holographic Memory Chosen as a Breakthrough by Physics World

January 5, 2015

Magnonic Holographic Memory demonstrated by researchers at the University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering in collaboration with the researches from the Russian Academy of Sciences has been recognized as one of the 10 Breakthroughs of the Year by The Physics World.

The breakthroughs were chosen by a panel of six Physics World editors and reporters, and the criteria for included the fundamental importance of research, significant advance in knowledge, strong connection between theory and experiment; and general interest to all physicists.

Alexander Khitun and Frederick Gertz at the University of California Riverside, and A Kozhevnikov and Y Filimonov of the Kotel'nikov Institute of Radioengineering and Electronics in Russia have built a new type of holographic memory device based on the interference of spin waves (the work is available online http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6922543&tag=1). Holography is a technique based on the wave nature of light which allows the use of wave interference between the object beam and the coherent background.It has the potential to store and retrieve large amounts of information in a very efficient way, but the storage density is limited by the wavelength of the light. The spin waves used in Khitun and colleagues' magnetic holography device have much shorter wavelengths than visible light, and could therefore be used to store data at higher densities. Experimental results obtained by the team show it is feasible to apply holographic techniques developed in optics to magnetic structures to create a magnonic holographic memory device. This approach combines the advantages of the magnetic data storage with the wave-based information transfer. Dr. Khitun has been working for more than nine years to develop logic device exploiting spin waves. Most of his initial research was focused on the development of spin wave-based logic circuits similar to the ones currently used in the computers. A critical moment occurred last year when the research direction changed towards holographic devices, which are aimed not to replace but to complement CMOS in special task data processing."The results open a new field of research, which may have tremendous impact on the development of new logic and memory devices," he said. Researchers are now focused on the demonstration of pattern recognition by using the developed magnonic holographic devices.

This research is supported in part by the FAME Center, one of six centers of STARnet, a Semiconductor Research Corporation program sponsored by MARCO and DARPA and by the National Science Foundation under the NEB2020 Grant ECCS-1124714.